Thank you, flacks of New York, for consistently providing society with valuable information it needs to know. Like in this press release:

• Colin Farrell's lawyer's beat up on poor little Jossip, but Jossip lives to tale the tale. [Jossip]
• Which is not to say Farrell's lawyers have caught up with all the cock pix quite yet. [Totally Joshness]
• Freygate forces Oprah to make a drastic move with her Book Club. [Storms Illustration via Emdashes]
• Naturally, the one time the English and the Germans successfully cooperate on something, it's a hideous line-dancing song you haven't been able to forget nearly a decade later. [Silver Jacket]
• Just in: Scientists have identified the four ur-Jewish mothers, from whom 40 percent of all Ashkenazim are descended. Reply the mothers, "What, so now you finally decide to write?" [Reuters via Yahoo!]
• We can't relieve believe we're mentioning this, but, as what's apparently Diabetes Appreciation Week continues, you can finally get away from the pictures of unfortunate, obese, poor people the Times has been foisting on us all and instead tune into CNBC Sunday night as — we kid you not — Poison's Bret Michaels "talks candidly about partying with diabetes." [dLife]

Cheney Hospitalized Briefly With Shortness of Breath [CNN]

Thank God for subheads. Otherwise we laypeople — and certainly that U.S. general in Iraq — would think more bleeding was a good sign.

Because the AIDS awareness and advocacy campaigns have gotten a little stale (Elijah Wood and duct tape? So 1994 snuff — yawn!), the AIDS Healthcare Foundation has decided to create a minor controversy by throwing a hissy-fit over a Pfizer print ad for Viagra. The foundation, which is the largest advocacy group in the country, claims an advertisement for the boner-maker "encourages the use of Viagra as a party drug" and thus contributes to the spread of itchy crotch and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Last year, if you'll recall, a Rockland County rabbi was going around giving orthodox Jewish babies herpes via a certain kind of circumcision practice that involves the mohel sucking blood from the newly snipped penis with his mouth. That dude's not doing it anymore, but, well, now there's more, according to today's News:

We've got to congratulate Jimmy Choo on this great ad, found bannered on the Allure website:

Today is, as we hope you know, World AIDS Day, and it's as good a time as any to remember that, two decades into the pandemic, millions of people worldwide are still dying and there is still no cure. This year, AmFAR chairman and lefty shoe designer Kenneth Cole created the "We All Have AIDS" awareness campaign. While it has goals we share and a King Christian of Denmark sensibility we admire, we're entirely unconvinced that selling this particular t-shirt is necessarily the best way to raise money for the cause.

Don't get us wrong. We understand the nature of the scientific method is to eliminating possibilities. But, still, we're amused by this definition of news. We await other, analogous headlines in future editions of Science Times:

After five years, the national press has finally discovered it can stand up to the Bush White House. So when the journalists are getting all uppity, and when Scott McClellan's stonewalling just won't keep them in place anymore, what's a desperate administration to do? Biological warfare, of course. Or at least so a conspiracy theorist could be, from the evidence presented by a high-ranking editor at one of the nation's major news organizations in an IM conversation with a Gawker Operative last night:

We recently realized that, despite the usual piss and vinegar we dump upon Jann Wenner's well-coiffed head, he does something for his employees that many media masters do not: He provides cheap flu shots. Granted, the health initiative could merely be to protect himself from getting sick whilst meandering around the Wenner Media office, but we don't really care about the rationale. The shots are included in the monthly healthcare costs for which most are already paying for, and the shots are offered in-office. It's so easy, we're inclined to think of Papa Jann as the King of Media Inoculation.

There's a highly sensitive feature on the Today show, where David Gregory is sitting down with 3 obese woman to talk about weight discrimination. After an intro video featuring folks around Rockefeller talking about how extremely overweight individuals strike them as lazy, we cut to the heavyset guests, one of whom looks so pissed that she might destroy everything in the studio. The segment is titled "Don't Hate Me Because I'm Fat," and as these woman sadly present their stories, we're left with a major question: Are we supposed to not hate them despite their being fat, or we shouldn't hate them specificially because they're fat?

Perhaps as a goodwill gesture towards its shrinking newsroom, the Gray Lady is tackling the omnipresent tension in staffers' necks:

Today in Kate Moss' big cokey adventure, the Queen of All That Is Sane, Salon's Rebecca Traister, gets to the point:

There's apparently a new crime wave in Manhattan, and — we kid you not — it's targeting Vitamin Shoppe superstores. Reports the Sun:

We know it's the job of the 11 o'clock news to scare us, but this one, which Chuck and Sue told us about last night, seems worse than usual:

Fran Drescher? Tom Green? Using blogs to fight cancer?

WARNING: DO NOT READ TODAY'S POST. You may be tempted by the cover story, which continues yesterday's finger-pointing at mafia spawn Victoria Gotti, who may have exaggerated her health concerns in order to gain public sympathy. But it's so not worth it. If you're sitting down and in a safe place, we'll explain:

Major scoop in today's Page Six: Gambino mob daughter and reality show darling Victoria Gotti is a liar. And while we normally admire liars for their loyalty to the art of fabrication, we're not fans of individuals who lie about just to obtain some public pity. Victoria Gotti, it seems, has done exactly that — which pretty much breaks our little hearts, as we had always loved Victoria like no other.

Between the day job and another project we're in the middle of, we worked about a ten-hour day yesterday. Then last night we met an old coworker for a few drinks, which turned into more than a few drinks, which were followed by a few cigarettes, even though we decided last week we weren't buying smokes anymore, because of Peter Jennings, and then a late dinner of bacon cheeseburgers and fries (and, for some reason, a scotch or two) at the Corner Bistro.